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Winter Journal

Wide Area File Services Could Save the Day

Written by
Shreyas Sadalgi
Thursday, 22 November 2007 03:22

Business calamities and disasters can occur at any time or any place, and recent disasters have expanded the scope of the potential damage to enterprise wide IT infrastructures, data, and storage. These disasters have also called into sharp focus the IT disaster prevention practices that businesses have been forced to implement. When natural and man-made disasters affect storage and round-the-clock availability of data, current IT backup and restore practices sometimes fall far short of “saving the day.”
Consider, for example, the blackout of 2003 across the Northeastern U.S., which crippled data interchange between locations and inflicted “pain” during crucial business hours among entire networked enterprises. Worldwide business establishments that require collaboration were effectively shut down at every location until power was restored at the affected locations. It was a true enterprise-wide IT disaster.
During this blackout, several facets of the collaborative environments were challenged. On one hand, working data was not yet